The Joy Project

A True Story of Inescapable Happiness

John Piper

John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Reading the Bible Supernaturally.

John Piper

John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Reading the Bible Supernaturally.

We tend to think of our pursuit of joy as a fundamental right. Perhaps. It is certainly fundamental to our nature. We were created to seek pleasure, and yet we find that we are chronic failures when it comes to finding the kind of joy that will last for more than a fleeting moment.

What if the deepest joy that we seek really can’t be found at all? What if the deepest and most durable happiness we could ever possess is a kind of joy that breaks into our lives and overcomes all our boredoms and ultimately finds us? What if the truest and deepest and most lasting joy is actually out of our reach, but somehow reaches back for us?

Here at desiringGod.org we ask serious questions about happiness. We don’t think there is anything more important for a human soul than being found by eternal joy. We ask very serious questions about joy and we seek solid answers in the Bible.

Volcanic Joy

The Joy Project pursues these serious questions about joy through a story — through the unrivaled narrative of God’s plan for our joy. The story begins and ends with God.

From all eternity, before all time, God was alive with volcanic joy. Joy is essential to the very nature of God in the fellowship of the infinitely happy and holy trinity. The Father loves the Son and finds him supremely well pleasing. The Son loves the Father and delights in all that he is. The Holy Spirit streams omnipotently with his joy between the Father and the Son.

So God needs nothing. He has no deficiencies. He is free from all evil and full of all good.

So what does God’s eternal, unbounded, overflowing joy mean for me? For you?

It means I am not a pawn on the chessboard of a needy God. Rather, he created me, not because he needs me to make up for some deficit that he has, but because he delights for his creatures to share the joy that he has in himself.

We don’t stumble onto this joy. It pursues us. It finds us. It is the amazing outcome of God’s astonishing plan to pull us into his own joy forever.

The Joy Project takes us into the most profound story in the universe, retold in a short book by Tony Reinke, one of our writers at Desiring God — a very thoughtful and skilled writer you can trust and enjoy.

Download It Free

You can download the entire book, free of charge, in three digital formats: